Film Quarterly
Fall, 1990
Kieslowski's "Short Films"
by Charles Eidsvik
A Short Film About Killing
Script and direction by Krzysztof Kieslowski.
Photography: Slamomir ldziak.
Music: Zbigniew Preisner.
Editor: Eva Smal.
A Short Film About Love
Script and direction by Krzysztof Kieslowski.
Photography: Witold Adamek.
Music: Zbigniew Preisner.
Editor: Eva Smal.
When Krzysztof Kieslowski's A Short Film about Killing was named the recipient of the first European
Film Prize, the "Felix," at the end of 1988, few filmgoers were familiar with Kieslowski's work. In a
competition that included Wim Wenders's Wings of Desire and Louis Malle's Au revoir les enfants, the
judges' choice of Kieslowski's strange and uncompromising film seemed to many European critics to be a
deliberate provocation: both a European declaration of independence from the entertainment values of
Hollywood and from the usual film festival adulation of big-name directors. Known primarily as a
documentarist, Kieslowski had previously made important but minor features-in particular, Camera Buff
(1975) and No End (1984)-and had won festival prizes for several other films, but was overshadowed by
Poles such as Wajda, Zanussi, and Holland. Further, Kieslowski did not fit the usual "important director"
mold: a one-time film professor whose recent work had been financed primarily by Polish television, his
work is deliberately modest. (A Short Film about Killing and A Short Film about Love cost a fraction of
even the absurdly low costs of most Polish features and both are, indeed, short by theatrical standards, at 85
and 90 minutes respectively-hence their titles.) The two films were produced as theatrical by-products of a
Decalog on contemporary issues suggested by the Ten Commandments (and in which shorter, one-hour
versions of the two "short films" also reside). But as his "short films" moved into European distribution,
critical attention to Kieslowski did not abate. Though his work remained outside of any mainstream
aesthetic, Kieslowski was invited to festival after festival, either as a participant or as a judge. Many
European intellectuals now regard him as perhaps the most important, and certainly the most disturbing
voice in Polish cinema. I will suggest why that is so and propose some terms in which Kieslowski's work
might be understood.
What is special about Kieslowski's work? First, his starting point: a near-total despair about the everyday
realities of housing-project Poland. For critics such as Munich's Peter Buchka,* Kieslowski's films are
brilliant autopsies of a society where nothing works, not even everyday human connections between
people; it is a land so moribund that (as Kieslowski has mumbled in interviews) no social movement, and
certainly no work of art, can have much effect. Partly it is that the communal aspect of culture has broken
down: lives are atomistic, with social structures keeping people apart rather than bringing them together.
And partly the problem is ontological: Kieslowski sees the lives of individuals as ruled largely by chance
rather than by fate or even probability. Like almost everyone in Poland's cities, Kieslowski's characters
live in drab concrete silos, virtually caged, cut off from normal contact: their loneliness is nearly total, and
their attempts to escape loneliness, whether by murder or love, form the spines of Kieslowski's stories.
These characters fight not only the culture they live in but ever-present contingency: their hopes and plans
have little more predictive value than a long-range weather forecast. As in his No End, in which he told
three stories, each dependent on whether a character stepped on a train or not, Kieslowski has continued to
be fascinated by the cavalier twists seemingly inconsequential events give to a life. His characters have
little control over their lives and little chance of success even in small matters. Kieslowski's outlook may
well be the gloomiest of any major director in Europe.
*Peter Buchka, "Weitere Nachricht aus einem kaputten Land: Krzysztof Kieslowskis 'Kurzer Film ueber
die Liebe", Suddeutsche Zeitung, I Juni, 1989.
But what makes his work important is that he has invented a style that makes near-hopelessness exciting on
a moment-by-moment-basis. Bringing to his fiction films the kind of tension found in nature
documentaries depicting the moment-by-moment struggles of small animals or insects to survive,
Kieslowski's films look and feel like no other film-maker's. He refuses the formulas of both the Eastern
European art cinema and of Hollywood. His films are rhythmically rather like Ingmar Bergman's ascetic
explorations in the period from The Silence through The Passion of Anna, but unlike Bergman's, they have
little interest in reflexivity; his films are about people, not about movies.
Perhaps it is most accurate to describe Kieslowski's style as an antithesis to those classical fiction-film
rhetorics in which each shot's job is to predict the next and in which the viewer is reassured by generic
conventions that how the story is bound to end is predetermined. There is no clear way of predicting how a
Kieslowski film (or even a Kieslowski scene or shot) will end; his camera follows, rather than leads, the
actions of his often impulsive characters. In part Kieslowski's style derives from the documentary practice,
born from necessity, of following rather than leading each "subject." But Kieslowski's shot structures and
editing are not those of documentary, in which the camera person must stand back enough not to affect the
subject, must frame loosely enough and with enough depth of field so that unexpected movement can be
covered, and must use natural light. Rather, he has taken those elements of documentary that signal
involvement with unpredictable, "live" people rather than with actors whose movements are blocked out in
advance, and combined these elements with a rethought version of fiction film technique.
A Short Film about Killing looks the more radical of the two films. Certainly it is the more relentlessly
pessimistic. Its structure is an intercutting of three stories: of a malicious young man who brutally murders
a cabby; of the cabby; and of a law student facing exams, whose first case will be to defend that killer. The
opening image announces the setting: a dead rat floats in a gutter in a grey concrete city under the dim
yellow-brown light so common in an Eastern Europe fueled by high-sulfur coal. Then Kieslowski bluntly
announces his theme: useless malice-a hanged cat dangles in a window. This theme will be played out
several times: by a cabby, by a malicious killer, by the state. The presence of senseless malice ties the film
together.
The story is low-mimetic and low-keyed. A cabby gets up in the morning, and begins to go about his day.
A law student goes to take his final exam. And the "main" character, a young drifter, watches a beating in
an alley, then goes about his day. He goes to a movie theater but is told the film is boring. He brings a
snapshot to a photo shop to get it enlarged, and asks where he can get a cab. He walks to an overpass, and
there, pushes a stone off a ledge. There is the sound of a car on the road below crashing, but he does not
stop to watch. Malicious but with no goal for that malice, he goes to a square where cabs pick up fares.
Frightened by the presence of cops, he goes to a cafe. There, he flirts through the window with a couple of
little kids, wraps a cord around one hand, and leaves. He gets a cab, has the driver go into the countryside,
strangles the driver with the cord, drags the body to a river, finds the driver still alive, smashes his head
with a rock, and leaves. Following this senseless and brutal murder, the drifter drives around, lasting one
night before he is caught. After that he has a trial, awaits execution, and is hanged. The drifter's story
provides the spine of the narrative.
The second viewpoint is the victim's. The cabby washes his cab. A young couple want a ride; he takes off
without them. He sees other potential customers: a woman with dogs; a homosexual, a drunk. He dodges
them. He edgily avoids customers he does not want. But he is not simply mean: when he sees a stray dog,
he gives the dog his sandwich. Eventually he picks up the young man. Once the young man begins to
garrot him, the cabby struggles, as if forever, before he dies.
The third viewpoint, that of the law student, brings a humane perspective to the story. He takes his exam.
The exam is one long confession of his problem with the law: the law is clear but circumstances are not;
rules and reality conflict. Asked why he wants to be a lawyer, he replies that he wants to meet people he
otherwise would never get to know. He passes his exam, and then he and his girlfriend go to a nearby cafe,
where they talk about marriage. Later, the young lawyer's first case is to defend the killer. He loses. He
visits the killer in death row. What bothers the lawyer most is that he remembers seeing the drifter in the
cafe; that any diversion at that point could have changed the events that followed. The killer asks him to
give the photo he had enlarged, a photo of a dead sister, to his mother, and explains that, but for an
accident in which the sister was killed, after which he was kicked out of his family, his life could have been
different. The lawyer observes the hanging, the carrying out of the state's malicious revenge, and leaves to
grieve alone.
Of the three main characters, only the law student/lawyer would be in a movie by anyone but Kieslowski.
The cabby is the jerk that city cabbies so often seem to be. He becomes truly sympathetic only when he
struggles to breathe and pleads for his life. But that is part of Kieslowski's point: anyone finally at the
point of dying is someone we identify with, and cannot stand to see die. Similarly with the murderer. As
we watch him cause a car accident, and even more as we watch him first strangle, then bludgeon the
cabby's head, he is utterly despicable: anyone in the audience would vote for the death penalty after
watching these scenes. But he becomes oddly sympathetic sitting in a cell, doomed, and then fully
sympathetic when, struggling against the guards, he is manhandled, shoved into the noose, and dies, his
sphincter muscle letting go of the contents of his guts down his pants leg as he dies. Like the lawyer, we
may feel no sympathy for what he has done, but want no part of the execution. That society decreed the
death is no matter: murder can be nothing but malicious. What the execution makes of the executioners is
beyond tolerance.
To get at the psychological ambiance of his film, Kieslowski resorts to old tools: vignetting, bled-out color,
high contrast. He films the killer's story expressionistically: cameraman Slamomir ldziak filtered the edges
of the frame with a yellow-brown net or gel. Though the drifter's face, especially in close-up, looks
relatively normal (though somewhat washed-out) the rest of the image goes yellow-brown: the young man
lives in a mental chemical smog. The cabby's story is less filtered but grayed-out, with color-drained
settings. The lawyer's story is more "human" in its tones; though Kieslowski desaturates color here too,
faces and textures-a wooden desk, a landscape-seem almost normal. Yet overall the film is a document
about the nearly unbearable.
In contrast, A Short Film about Love is by turns comic and colorfully erotic; though nearly equally
pessimistic about the setting of contemporary Poland, it is prettier to watch. The characters seem as lonely
as those in Killing, but basically harmless. The protagonist, Tomek, was raised in an orphanage; he works
in a post office and lives with his best friend's mother. From the friend (who is now in Syria) Tomek
acquired not only the room but the hobby of spying on Magda, a thirtyish artist with an active love life,
who lives across the courtyard. The film begins with Tomek stealing a high-powered telescope so he can
watch Magda more closely. Watching, he falls in love, not as adults tend to, but like a schoolboy crush-
turned on, jealous, puerile, prankish, and frustrated. To see her more often, he invents ruses to get her to
come to his post office window, and takes a second job delivering milk to her apartment building.
Eventually he confesses he has been watching her. Furious, she has a boyfriend beat Tomek up. But when
she sees his bruised face, she relents and agrees to a date. They have tea. Tomek confesses he also has
stolen some of her mail. Outraged, she gets him to come to her place. There, unable to control himself, he
ejaculates as soon as she has put his hand on her. She laughs at him and tells him that is love: a selfish
urge that makes a mess. Tomek goes home and slits his wrists, but lives, because his landlady finds him
and gets an ambulance. But the moment Tomek leaves, Magda, torn by guilt, tries to contact Tomek to get
him to return. She begins to pursue him: she goes to the post office; she makes inquiries of his landlady.
Finding what he has done, she becomes obsessed with getting in touch with him. In A Short Film about
Love eroticism is just one way in which the need to touch other people is expressed, but it is an inseparable
part not only of Tomek's attraction to Magda (and later, perhaps, of her fascination with him) but also of
the old landlady's attraction to Tomek. Made into spiritual shut-ins by the high-rise compartments in which
they live and the bureaucracies in which they work, their attempts at love must necessarily be neurotic. But
any attempt at love in Kieslowski's world is acceptable. Unlike films (such as Peeping Tom or Rear
Window) in which there is something perverse about voyeurism, in Kieslowski's world the urge to watch is
at least a result of the desire to share another's life, and a potential preliminary to making closer contact.
Kieslowski switched cameramen on A Short Film about Love, here working with Witold Adamek.
Adamek lets color saturate; above all, he fills the film with bravura shot combinations, in which "fiction"
setups are played against documentary techniques in order to create involvement. Adamek does not care
about shadow detail: his key lights are hard, hitting in pools and often leaving a lot of the screen dark.
Rather than model noses and cheekbones prettily with soft fill lighting, Adamek often uses harsh spotlights
from above and the side, letting actors move into and out of pools of light. How we see the characters thus
varies from moment to moment: one instant, for example, Magda looks astonishingly pretty; the next,
completely ordinary. As a result, our perceptions even of a straightforward scene become complicated: we
are not allowed the constancy effect, the stabilizing of our perceptions which prolonged contact with a
person in everyday life (or conventional movie lighting) normally provides.
Adamek's camera stays glued to the characters, with continual correction of the framing as the actors move.
The actors seem to move freely, impulsively, giving the impression of not having been blocked for ease of
filming. (There also seems to be little or no "cheating" of their positions or movements to get them into
frames and dolly shots neatly.) In some shots the camera seems shoulder mounted (but not shaky); the
camera stays with the characters as if it were a character, fighting to be in the right place to see, but without
the axle-grease smoothness and technical savoir faire of mainstream cinema's silky camera moves. Adamek
enhances the effects of his edgy struggle to stay on top of the action by using relatively long lenses, tight
compositions, and shallow depths of field. Often, as in documentaries, objects get in the way of what we
want to see, and Adamek must move around them. The objects (as in documentary) do not seem planted
for effect but just part of the clutter of reality. The camera continually reframes, refocuses, and then cuts to
a new, better vantage point. As in a documentary, Adamek foregrounds the struggle with real locations,
with the impulsiveness that makes real people so hard to document, with the contingencies that give
documentary-like presence to a moment.
But the camera work still echoes and alludes to the standard conventions of fiction film. In interior scenes
(such as one in which Tomek and Magda sit down for tea) Kieslowski and Adamek shoot from something
close to the usual positions. But instead of the usual procedures for handling these positions, Kieslowski
and Adamek invent their own. Conventional camera positions save set-up and lighting time by shooting
such a scene from beginning to end from two positions; in the edit, segments from each position ping-pong
back and forth. But A Short Film about Love rarely repeats camera setups precisely; as if they were
shooting a documentary in sequence, Kieslowski and Adamek keep shifting, hunting for a fresh frame and
perspective for each moment. Sometimes shots and cutting rhythms are unpredictable. For example, in the
scene in which Magda runs from the post office, frustrated and humiliated by another prank summons to
get mail, Tomek follows, and calls after her, confessing it is his fault. The camera sweeps with Tomek,
stopping only after he does. Kieslowski comes in close for Magda's angry reaction as she tells Tomek to
disappear, goes in a wide shot with Tomek as he tells her he saw her cry last night, then into a series of
varied shots as she reacts and he confesses he has watched her and that he loves her. But none of these
camera positions or the cuts between them gives the sense that the scene was rehearsed and repeated for
each camera position; the impression is of a spontaneous event, caught by a chance perception.
The film's most conventional visual element is its use of saturated reds. Tomek covers his scope with red
cloth, Magda's bedspread and telephone are red, and she has red stick-ons on her door; her weaving also
has red motifs. Red is Magda's color, a gesture of rebellion against the greyness of the world in which she
lives. Unlike the other characters, her response to other people, to objects, to life is openly tactile and,
despite her bitterness and cynicism, passionate. Her tactility, her potential for touching other people, feels
especially seductive in the context of Kieslowski's gray Poland.
In the film's final scene, Magda sees a light in Tomek's room. She runs to the apartment, and asks to see
Tomek. He is asleep. Magda reaches to touch his bandaged wrists. The landlady stops her, trying to
protect him. Magda then goes to the telescope, looks at her apartment, and imagines herself the night she
cried, but now with Tomek with her as a friend to comfort her. When touch is impossible, the voyeuristic
imagination takes over. But that at least gives the hope that there might be touch again, and with touch, a
future.
Like Bergman's work in the 1960s, Kieslowski's is about loneliness and the search for human contact, for
touch. Unlike Bergman's characters, however, Kieslowski's struggle against more than inner angst: their
society gives them little chance that contingency will work for rather than against them. Peter Buchka may
well be right that Kieslowski's films are an autopsy of Poland. But they are hardly a writing off of Polish
people. One by one Kieslowski's characters struggle for contact. They are not all malicious killers. A
young lawyer befriends a doomed man and weeps at his death. A landlady treats a young man as if he
were her own son. A woman forgives a young man for spying on her. Each of these tries to reach out, to
find something decent to do. And in this reaching out Kieslowski finds some small hope for, if not Poland,
at least some of its people.
As Kieslowski's producer remarked to Kieslowski when he received the first European film prize, "So long
as there are directors like you, Poland is not yet lost." That may or may not be true. But Kieslowski has
found a form to make the struggle for spiritual survival in such a land exciting. That struggle can be filmed
by treating stories as if they were real, by treating characters as if they were people, by treating film as if it
were always a document. In Kieslowski's world most characters do not have much chance of success. But
their struggle! Kieslowski has shown us an exciting way to film struggle. And in this showing, perhaps he
has opened a new path for film-makers who do not want to forget their respect for reality when making
fiction films.
CHARLES EIDSVIK